I have heard of instances where males have died from over-breeding. I have had males breed as early as 4 1/2 months and as light as 394 grams. Some will breed earlier, but that is the exception rather than the rule. I keep pairing until I see obvious signs or until the end of May.Īs a rule… males usually start breeding consistently their 2nd winter at 800 grams or more.

On March 1 I start to raise temps back to normal 24/7. I also look for other obvious signs that are be covered below. I’ve been fooled when I didn’t feel any early only to have females go on and ovulate. While many breeders start palpitating for follicles in January, we do not. Humidity is in the 60-70% range in our room all year. We continue to observe and document all activity… positive or negative. When they stop feeding on their own is usually a good sign and a time to look for signs of building towards ovulation (see pics below). We feed our snakes as long as they want to eat. We continue to feed during the breeding season, but only small meals (3-4 week old rats) and only every 10 days depending on where we are in the breeding cycle. Some do more but this works for us and we don’t exhaust our males this way. We try to breed every female at least once every shed cycle. We leave them in for 2-3 days or shorter if we observe copulation. Starting November 1 we introduce males into the female’s containers. More security… the more comfortable they are and the more they may breed. I think more hours in the dark lead to more security. Is there any scientific reasoning behind it? Not really… it’s just the way we do it and it works for us.

Although Ball pythons come from Africa and they live on or very close to the equator, where there is no light change (12/12), we still increase the length of darkness during the breeding season. We use natural sunlight spectrum bulbs in our room. We start to adjust our lighting to make shorter days. The hot spot goes down to 82 F and the cool end is 78 F.

Ball python incubator